Throughout my four years on the campus of the University of Tennessee, I've gotten my fair share of parking tickets. Maybe a few of them were justified; heck, nobody's perfect.

But I've noticed a growing trend over the last year that bothers me on a daily basis; it seems like the University of Tennessee Police force writes a lot more tickets than it solves crime.

Now, understandably, the ratio of parking tickets to crimes committed is nowhere near even (which is great). There are way more illegal parkers than criminals roaming our concrete jungle, but the response to crimes committed and a student commuter being parked in a UT staff lot are completely inverse to what they should be.

For example, I was driving around campus one afternoon and noticed a UT policeman writing parking tickets in the staff lot behind the Communications Building. Not ten minutes later, I notice the exact same cop writing tickets in Staff Lot Nine, behind the Humanities and Social Sciences Building. Another ten minutes go by, and I drive through Circle Park, only to find that same officer "serving and protecting" my fellow students by issuing citations.

I must explain that I am a class checker for the UT football team, and my job requires that I drive around campus a lot. That means I get to see our tuition fast at work on a daily basis, ensuring that all illegal parkers are punished.

One would think that people so dedicated to searching for lawbreakers on campus would also be as diligent when real crime took place. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case. I'll start with a personal story:

• It's the day of the Southeastern Conference Football Championship in 2004, my freshman year at UT. I was a non-commuter living in Hess Hall at the time, so I didn't use my car on a daily basis. I parked my car in the non-commuter parking lot adjacent to Hess six days prior to that fateful Saturday. When I walked out to get in my car with some friends to drive to my parents' house for the game, I noticed my driver's side window was broken out. On the inside, my CD player was ripped out, and shards of glass lined the floorboard. Obviously, I was angry, but when I saw a note under my windshield wiper that the UT Police left for me, I lost it. The note was five days old, and barely legible because it rained twice during that week, meaning my car was left unattended with an open window for a week, without my knowledge of anything that happened. All the police did was leave a note with a number to call about filing a report. It would have been easy for the cops to run the license plate number on my vehicle to find out who the owner was, then call and inform me about the incident. Instead, they just left me a note that was rained upon, along with the inside of my car.

Here are some other examples of how serious the UT Police is about protecting the students:

• They send emails to students about crimes that happened the night, or in some cases, an entire day before. This means the criminal is on the loose for anywhere from 12 to 24 hours before we even find out about it.
  
• There was a bomb threat at the Humanities and Social Sciences Building about a month ago, and the building was evacuated immediately. The new UT Alert text-messaging system warned students about the bomb scare-30 minutes after it happened. Students that were in the building and had UT Alert weren't any more aware of the situation than I was.
• One of the same cops that writes tickets to his fellow students also used his UT Police truck to park in Staff Lot Nine, where he has a class in the Art and Architecture Building. I checked a football player three days a week in this class, and the truck was parked there (illegally) a lot. 

Despite evidence to the contrary, I really don't have a hatred for the men and women who wear the uniform of the UT Police. It's not them I'm after, it's the people that make policy over at UTPD I have an issue with. Like any other college student, the ones working for UTPD need jobs. They have to write tickets to keep their job, so that's what they do.

I want to speak with people like Chief of Police August J. Washington, who is the 'top dog' over at UTPD. He might have some answers for me, or he could at least refer me elsewhere.

When I go to the Frequently Asked Questions area of the UTPD website, here's what I see: 

Am I missing something here, or are the two most frequently asked questions directly related to parking issues? The first question to come up about crime is number four, and the next two FAQs directly question the ability and authority of the UTPD.

Not only has the administration behind UTPD taken any real authority away from its officers, it has supplanted it with comtempt from students for the officers' ticket-writing practices.

This travesty needs to stop, because it's not like UT is building any more parking lots to help us out (they sell many more parking passes than the the number of spaces they actually have).

I say, make our police force one to be proud of. We're supposed to be on the same side anyway.